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Whitney E. Laemmli
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    • About
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    Whitney E. Laemmli
    • Hero
    • About
    • Research
    • Events
    • Publications
    • CV
    • Contact
    • …  
      • Hero
      • About
      • Research
      • Events
      • Publications
      • CV
      • Contact
      • Hero
      • About
      • Research
      • Events
      • Publications
      • CV
      • Contact
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        • Whitney E. Laemmli

          Historian of science and technology.

        • I am a historian of science and technology and an assistant professor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. My work focuses on the study and control of the human body, and I am currently completing a book manuscript titled Measured Movements, which explores how and why human movement became a central object of scientific, political, and popular concern over the course of the twentieth century. I've been honored to receive fellowships and awards from the SSRC, the ACLS/Mellon Foundation, the History of Science Society's Forum for the History of the Human Sciences, and the Society for the History of Technology. Prior to arriving at CMU, I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and spent 2016-2019 as a member of Columbia University’s Society of Fellows.

           

          Special areas of ongoing research interest include the history of information and data; art, science, and technology; the human and social sciences; and religion and technology.

        • Research

          A description of my current book project, Measured Movements, can be found below. Other publications and projects have investigated the material history of the ballet pointe shoe, the sexual rehabilitation of paraplegic WWII veterans, and the relationship between modern technology and religion.

           

           

           

          Measured Movements: The Human Body and the Choreography of Modern Life

          My current book manuscript, Measured Movements, illuminates how a technology designed to record movement became a tool for managing social, cultural, and political life in the United States and United Kingdom after World War II. Developed by the German choreographer (and future Nazi Minister of Dance) Rudolf Laban in the 1920s, “Labanotation” employed a complicated “scientific” symbology to capture bodily movement on paper. Each chapter of the book explores a new episode in Labanotation’s movement from Nazi Germany to the factories, hospitals, and corporate boardrooms of Britain and the United States. There, it was used to provide spiritual salve for exhausted assembly line workers, to identify and treat war veterans and Holocaust survivors, to screen white-collar job applicants, and by folklorist Alan Lomax to assuage Americans’ unease about a multicultural world. Labanotation’s surprising appeal, I argue, derived from the twin promises it made to its users. First, that movement could provide individuals with a source of emotional solace, personal expression, and spiritual redemption. And, second, that this expressive potential would never go too far: movement would be continually monitored, broken down into its constituent parts, and put in the service of modern states, institutions, and bureaucracies. In creating a notation system ostensibly capable of turning any movement into easily analyzable data, Laban’s work not only served to preserve a fading past, but seemed to open up new possibilities for the literal choreographing of modern life.

           

           

           

           

        • Upcoming and Recent Events

          New York Academy of Sciences, Lyceum Society

          June 3, 2019

          Princeton University, History of Science Colloquium

          September 18, 2019

          University of Pennsylvania, Collaborative Pedagogies in the Global History of Science

          October 11-12, 2019

          Society for the History of Technology

          October 24-27, 2019

          Johns Hopkins University, Colloquium in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

          November 7, 2019

          Purdue University, Science and Technology in the Long 20th Century

          November 15-16, 2019
        • Selected Publications

          • “The Living Record: Alan Lomax and the World Archive of Movement,” in History of the Human Sciences 31 (December 2018), Special Issue on “The Total Archive: Data, Subjectivity, Universality.”
             
          • “Paper Dancers: Art as Information in Twentieth Century America” in Information and Culture 52 (January 2017).
             
          • "Alan Lomax and the Temple of Movement." Limn 6: The Total Archive, March 2016.
             
          • “Half a Man: The Symbolism and Science of Paraplegic Impotence in World War II America,” in Osiris 30, “Scientific Masculinities,” ed. Robert A. Nye and Erika Lorraine Milam (October 2015). With Beth Linker.
             
          • “A Case in Pointe: Romance and Regimentation at the New York City Ballet,” in Technology and Culture 56 (January 2015).

            Winner of the 2018 Abbot Payson Usher Prize from the Society for the History of Technology.
             
          • Review of The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida, Introduction and Translation by David Mitchell, Somatosphere, 24 October 2014.

           

        • Download Curriculum Vitae.

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